This past Wednesday night we had an educational breakthrough during our education committee meeting with Drew Marston, Diane Geldreich, Hank Posters, Kim Niles, Gregg Oliver, Rich Ostrin, Harry Cullen, Dave Clinard, and myself. We started out just as every educational board meeting has started out for as long as I've been active with the section (too many years to count), but then it all started coming together and we began thinking outside of the box.  I guess it took a while for our food to settle in because all of a sudden, WHAM ... the ideas started flying so fast you could almost grab them in the air above our heads.  If you recall my last three messages (see March, April, May) were all about National ASQ showing how ASQ is changing and how we are only meeting a small portion of our membership's needs.  Well, if what I've rambled on about is true, then a huge percentage of you reading this message could be persuaded to sign up for a section related program if we offered exactly what you wanted.  We ended up with a much more clear picture of what our ideal section educational program could be like.  Therefore, I'm excited to present our educational vision and goal related thoughts below (no expectations please).

Our educational vision (long term; not officially adopted) is therefore to become a shining example to all other sections by continuously improving our ability to offer a wide range of types of training, areas of knowledge, learning vehicles, time frames, costs, measures of improvement, and other included benefits. Possible details include:

• Types of Training: In person, team oriented, and self directed.

• Areas of knowledge: ASQ offers 12 certificate programs (CQE, CQA, CSQE, CQIA, CCT, CQT, CRE, CMI, CQM, Six Sigma Black Belt, and CQA-HACCP) but note that many of these programs have overlapping modules of instruction.

• Learning Vehicle: There are too many vehicles to list everything.  Examples include Guru guided question and answer sessions, In-person lectures, on-line presentations, reading books, listening to tapes or cd's, radio shows, working out problems, discussion forums, working groups, numerous forms of testing and review, etc.

• Time frames: Continuous, oriented to special dates (such as certification test dates), oriented to availability, and oriented to convenience.

• Cost: Break even target but ideally managed by the individual via his or her ability to adjust other areas listed here.

• Measures for Improvement: From cost justified return on investment (i.e. Six Sigma projects) to no measurements at all.

• Other Benefits: Too many to mention all of them. Examples include food, location / convenience, certificates, re-certification points, handouts, electronic programs, etc.

Our educational goals (near term; not officially adopted) include the following specific considerations:

• Full topic courses (currently called refresher courses).

• Distance education full topic courses (e-courses). We only need two more to justify the CRE (email Hank).

• Mono-topic or section topic courses (i.e. just on statistics to cover all CQE, CRE, SSBBelt, CQM statistic areas).

• Mono-topic or section topic distance education courses (same but via email / web).

• Real refresher courses (about 12 hours to cover examples of all typical question types).

• One day training courses (for unusual situations or topics; i.e. Six Sigma Champion Training; perhaps for rarely covered mono-topics).

• Three hour workshops (currently offering 10 per year; one next week if we can get seven more RSVP's).

• Regular meetings (currently offering 12 per year).

• Educational study groups (envision a continuous but changing group of people meeting regularly to listen to short lectures, work out problems, and ask questions; low or no cost).

• Other types of self assisted or self directed learning (perhaps a guru on duty, articles published, article writing assistance, etc.)

By now I've either lost you or ignited that little flame of hope inside you that tells you that you can become that better person you want to be.  For all of you I've lost, please RSVP now for next weeks 3-hour workshop on InThinking (thinking about thinking) as you could really benefit from attending this workshop.  For all of you who now have ten times more enthusiasm to help us become the educational example of all ASQ sections, please RSVP now for next weeks 3-hour workshop on InThinking (thinking about thinking) as you could really benefit from attending this workshop ...<smile>.

Please send me your thoughts via email now while your thinking of it at asq_chick@hotmail.com, and also please RSVP for next month's regular ISO related meeting now as it will be early in the month (July 8; see meetings).

See you soon!